I'm going to start in reverse.

Yes, I agree to this, which is why the education aspect is so important. We give kids a 1/2 assed, destitute, very limited, drug education, where we tell them (paraphrased): "Never do drugs, drugs are bad.". The real education they should have, and my wife and I give our kids (paraphrased): "Drugs can be fun, interesting, expand your mind, and create a different operating dynamic. If you want to try a drug, learn about it, research it, secure a safe supply, test it, and set up a situation where you're safe, and it's controlled.". Why did so many kids in high school try mushrooms, or cannabis? They tried it because the parent said "No!", and "This will destroy your life", but then noticed that wasn't true.

Our schools use to hold police led education nights, where officers would "educate" youth and parents on the dangers of drugs, but it was never correct, or reasonable information. They still teach that cannabis is a gateway drug, gateway to what? Cannabis does not lead to heroin use, what leads to harder drugs, are the lies, and kids realizing they were lied to, if cannabis is safe, heroin is safe, and that's the real issue.

I did, and I offered all my advice, documentation, and even Moodle courses to the school and board for FREE. I offered to come in as a security expert and talk to the kids, and was denied. My home network costs north of 5k, and I understand that some family just can't spend that much, and shouldn't. If you could buy any one device, a good firewall / router. The Dream Machine Pro, as an example, is a great solution, and if you bought just one device to lock your network down, that's what I'd buy (again), I own two of them.

Apart from a good firewall and router, you need to educate kids on how to set up their environments, and this is where the schools are failing badly. Kids should know how disgusting insecure most default set ups are, and simple, easy, and straightfoward solutions on how to cover 90% of the issues. Simple things like what a VPN is actually good for, or, what exentions you should be installing in your browser. What settings in your OS you should be turning off, and just basic instruction. Don't teach them about Group Policy, if you want the other 10%, sure, but you don't need it, 90% is good enough for 99% of circumstances.

This is a fun point to take on. I have a condition called Chronic Neuropathic Pain Disorder ,which cause chronic pain. The pain ranges from annoying to a hard kick in the nuts. Over the last 5-years I've been on every class of pain killer / neuropathic pain medication, which is over 50. I've had prescription grade fentanyl, at a grade and strength higher then you'll get on the street. Somewhere near me, I'm also legally blind so I really can't see the bottles, are bottles of hydromorphone, toradol, T4, T3, morphine, and something else. I also have several kg's of cannabis home grown, and more edibles, oils, and vapes then you've probably seen at a house. I would have a pretty good excuse for being an addict, but, I have to balance my treatments with the understanding that addiction is possible.

This is why I also say that addiction is a choice, I have to choose to be productive, and not high, which is not a simple choice. I've taken one day off in 5-years for pain, and I didn't really take it off, I blacked out and my wife found me seizing on the floor, and was rushed to the hospital. To fairly quote you:

That's the entire point I'm making, something being addictive is not the problem, have you had a Twix? Oreo's? Pringles? Lots of things are addictive, but you have to make the choice to abuse it.

If they're trying to express an opinion or point, without being a loud obnoxious lunatic, that's one thing. If they want to go off on rants and unfounded nonsense just to bug and disturb people, that's a different point. Freedom of expression means they can express themselves, short of hate speech, which I don't think it's defined clearly enough, but, it's a balancing act.

if they show up at the town hall, and are just there to cause problems, they should be sent away, and parents should get involved, unless they're causing a problem for the right reasons.

If the argument is that it's a wasteland of digital violation, a true digital Epstein's island, that's fine! I'll agree to that all day along, but, the solution to that issue is proper federal intervention, and Canada will never regulate that properly.

There's a difference between paying attention in school, and being able to voice your opinion. When the grade 6 teacher tried to force all the "white kids" to stands and apologize for crimes against Native Americans, my daughter was justified in refusing. We only found out that happened because she made an audio recording of it, and the school's reaction was to blame her, since she didn't have permission to record the teacher. There's been other events where my daughters call out the bad education, and in the cases they called it out, it was just incorrect / intentionally misleading information.



Paying attention is one thing, and you should pay attention, but, you shouldn't tolerate being lied to, and silenced, if you have a valid point.

In our specific case, the girls need a mobile phone because they spend time with their biological father, or use to, and his living situation is, and was, less than ideal, so it was for safety.

They're unable to use it responsible because the education from the parents is lacking, and it's even worse in the classroom. Kids should be educated on cyberspace, but schools do a terrible job, and parents do a worse job, in general.

Before you can monitor kids, you need to educate them, and most parents aren't. It's not Facebook's job to trivialize responsibility, and that's where this falls off the rails.

I won't argue that, it could be done safely, offline, and private, but that's another discussion.

Parents have the tools, parents have access to infrastructure, and so the excuse that parents need more is wrong. Parents need education, it's not Facebook's job to educate them, that's where the real issue is.

I just saw the other one, and posted on it. The point still hold, how at the scale of Facebook would you really keep kids safe?

A few points that are being intentionally left out:

1. Addiction is a choice by an addict, except in rare cases.
2. A product should be legally addictive; otherwise you'd never use it.
3. A product being "addictive", is not the same as your choice to abuse it.
4. It's a parent's job to teach about the dangers of uncontrolled use.
5. It's a parent's job to secure their network to prevent abuse.

My network, for instance, at 10pm, 7 days a week, shuts off all internet to child owned devices. We have the mobile data shut off at the same time, and both are off until 9am the next day. The only way to circumvent that block, would be to connect via Ethernet into the switches, which are Mac restricted on the ports, so you'd have to bypass that as well.

On top of those restrictions, the kids have their own segregated networks, two of them, which have deep packet inspection, extra IPS and IDS. Network monitoring, and TLS inspection. That's what responsible parents do, it's not 1993, or 2003, or 2013, you need to implement the right infrastructure.

6. Parents need to teach about the reality of social media.

It's not your friend, Facebook, Google, Windows, YouTube, Amazon, are all just versions of Epstein's island in cyberspace. Your kids should know that Facebook is forcibly digitally molesting them. They should know that Windows or ChromeOS is logging and analyzing every keystroke. They should be scared to use a computer which isn't locked down tighter then a nun's nasty. Furthermore, they should know how to use VPN's, TOR proxies, IPSec, and why extensions which block traffic, and mask signatures are critical.

The reality is far too many parents, and to a lesser extent teachers, are ignorant, incompetent, and completely unprepared for the current cyber landscape. YouTube, X, Facebook, Roadblocks, aren't completely innocent, but most parents are watching their kids inject the digital equivalent of heroin, and blaming the access to the heroin, instead of teaching responsible drug use.

In our house, we teach what the dangers are, instead of vilifying fairly innocent products, we teach about responsible use, with enough forcible restriction to keep kids safe from themselves. If you teach your kids about drugs, you would never tell them to stay away, don't touch, don't try, all drugs are evil. You'd teach them to research, prepare, understand, test, and make sure they do their homework. The worst thing you can do because my parents did, would be to blacklist everything fun, cool, and interesting. No one dies from a safe supply of LSD, that been property tested, sources, and researched, they die because it's not LSD, and they had no idea what they were doing.

It's a social network, children should have the same protections for freedom of expression that we give to every person. Silencing them, or not letting them use the town square, is really just excessive censorship. If we're talking about adult content focused sites, that fine, you'd have to show your ID to get alcohol, cannabis, or adult videos, but not for a social network.

Yes, the scale at which Facebook operates is not a simple moderation implementation. Facebook is large enough that you could define its network as an internet, it's so large and complex that it's a digital entity in its own right.

They're a company, they want to make their product as legally addictive as possible, it would be bad practice to not make it legally addictive. Addition is the fault of the addict, except in rare circumstance, and if you have kids, you need to be educating them on safe device use. Funny story about that, both of my daughters got in trouble at primary school (and one in secondary), for calling out the bad practices during lessons, and refusing to use some "required" software, on the grounds they were analytic nightmares.

If you're going to hold Facebook accountable for violating children's rights, what software do you let them use? What hardware?

Yes, both good ideas, but then they'll be in a lawsuit that a child figured out how to turn on the "bad settings", or circumvent their parent's control setting.

Let's get it clear up front, that any child exploitation is terrible.

At a scale the size of Facebook, what could they really do to "protect children"? Unless you take an extreme stance of not letting anyone on the platform under 18 (or 21), I don't think it's possible.

Chuck Norris has to reap death, he outlasted him, he's not dead, he's doing a side quest.